I did not know this was science fiction (or magic realism) but when I discovered it was about cloning people to use their organs I was horrified. To develop feeling for characters who have no hope and no future is painful to say the least. I would warn anyone against it who expects an English Boarding School story with fights, romances, misbehaviours, intellectual growth and nice and not so nice teachers. All that was there in the context of semi-human experimental people.I admit it was well written, since Ishiguro is incapable of writing badly. ( )

I had heard so many great things about this book, and I can tell you it did not disappoint. It's a really great book if you are a YA reader and want to give a more adult, contemporary novel a try. I actually watched the movie before getting my hands on the book, and would recommend reading the book first if you're interested in the movie.

This is a story about three childhood friends, told through the eyes of Kathy in flashbacks and stories of her upbringing at a boarding school in the English countryside. She tells of her childhood and the circumstances of her life, as well as the lives of her two best friends Ruth and Tommy and their schoolmates. A lot happens, and there is a surprising, underlying science fiction theme in the novel that gives such a different feel to the story. It's a sort of coming of age story with a twist.

It's a hard novel to describe without giving anything away. It can get a bit confusing, but once you understand the strange situation that Kathy and her friends have been born into, the story really cements itself into place and draws you in.

I really enjoyed reading this book and am excited to read more by Ishiguro. ( )

A very strange and unsettling story, an alternative history really, how things could have been. There is an underlying anxiety behind all the mundane happenings at the fictitious English boarding school. But it is such a familiar feeling, growing up and knowing that something is not quite right, there's a conspiracy of misinformation, there are rumours, and no one wants to face the awful truth. In some ways a frustrating read, but it leaves you with a lot to reflect upon. The theme here is lives that are wasted, or maybe they were just doing their job? ( )

I began reading this book not knowing anything about it. I was frustrated and confused in the beginning but as I continued and the author began to give more information as to what was happening I became excited and thought that the book was starting to go somewhere. Unfortunately by the end of the book I was just as frustrated as in the beginning. I felt there were too many unanswered questions and that the author did take the plot as far as it could have been taken. This would be a good book for a book group to discuss ( )

Never Let Me Go has some of the most authentic human interaction I have ever read. It is often painfully tender, describing relationships in their complicated and difficult details.

The significance of petty interaction to personal experience is dramatically communicated. There is an abundance of description when two people are interacting, and poignant details supplement the memories of the narrator.

However, the people so clearly visible in this story are in many ways utterly alien. They make decisions which clearly do not follow from my perspective. The world itself is broken in a way that is terrifying, painful, and in my opinion never justified.

This book is the emotional equivalent of the film "Saw". It is full of pain, without any ultimate purpose or satisfying justification.

In many ways it is well-made, but the end product made me feel terrible. ( )

Ishiguro is extremely good at recreating the special, oppressive atmosphere of school (and any other institution, for that matter)—the cliques that form, the covert rivalries, the obsessive concern with who sat next to whom, who was seen talking to whom, who is in favor at one moment and who is not.

"Never Let Me Go" is marred by a slapdash, explanatory ending that recalls the stilted, tie-up-all-the loose-ends conclusion of Hitchcock's "Psycho." The remainder of the book, however, is a Gothic tour de force that showcases the same gifts that made Mr. Ishiguro's 1989 novel, "The Remains of the Day," such a cogent performance.

This extraordinary and, in the end, rather frighteningly clever novel isn't about cloning, or being a clone, at all. It's about why we don't explode, why we don't just wake up one day and go sobbing and crying down the street, kicking everything to pieces out of the raw, infuriating, completely personal sense of our lives never having been what they could have been.

Wikipedia in English (2)

At the age of thirty-one, Kathy H. is coming to the end of her time as a carer – a milestone that prompts her to reflect on her unusual life. She begins, naturally, with her childhood at Hailsham, where she and her friends Ruth and Tommy negotiated the lessons and Exchanges set by their guardians, as well as the constant social pressures of school life. As her recollections progress, however, Kathy must take care not to delve too deeply into the tangled knot of her own emotions. The past holds no refuge for her; even since childhood, the knowledge of what the future holds has always been there, deep down – and some truths are too terrible to be confronted.

All children should believe they are special. But the students of Hailsham, an elite school in the English countryside, are so special that visitors shun them, and only by rumor and the occasional fleeting remark by a teacher do they discover their unconventional origins and strange destiny. Kazuo Ishiguro's sixth novel, Never Let Me Go, is a masterpiece of indirection. Like the students of Hailsham, readers are "told but not told" what is going on and should be allowed to discover the secrets of Hailsham and the truth about these children on their own.

Offsetting the bizarreness of these revelations is the placid, measured voice of the narrator, Kathy H., a 31-year-old Hailsham alumna who, at the close of the 1990s, is consciously ending one phase of her life and beginning another. She is in a reflective mood, and recounts not only her childhood memories, but her quest in adulthood to find out more about Hailsham and the idealistic women who ran it. Although often poignant, Kathy's matter-of-fact narration blunts the sharper emotional effects you might expect in a novel that deals with illness, self-sacrifice, and the severe restriction of personal freedoms. As in Ishiguro's best-known work, The Remains of the Day, only after closing the book do you absorb the magnitude of what his characters endure. --Regina Marler

Hailsham seems like a pleasant English boarding school, far from the influences of the city. Its students are well tended and supported, trained in art and literature, and become just the sort of people the world wants them to be. But, curiously, they are taught nothing of the outside world and are allowed little contact with it. Within the grounds of Hailsham, Kathy grows from schoolgirl to young woman, but it's only when she and her friends Ruth and Tommy leave the safe grounds of the school (as they always knew they would) that they realize the full truth of what Hailsham is.… (more)